Bridge of Spies (43 page)

In the tense weeks preceding the final U-2 overflights, Bissell has asked Burke for his assessment of the likelihood of a shoot-down by Soviet surface-to-air missiles. Burke tells him there is a high probability of a successful intercept “provided the detection [of the U-2 by Soviet air defenses] is made in time.” This means that anyone hoping for Powers to get through must ensure that he is not detected early. Conversely, anyone hoping for him to be shot down would be wise to do everything possible to advertise his mission in advance.

Beerli leaves for Oslo believing May 1 is the target date for Powers’s flight. “As far as I knew, May 1st was the only day,” he says. “When I left Washington, that was the plan.” If so, there was no need for Powers or the Quickmove team to arrive in Peshawar before the night of Saturday, April 30. Yet by this time Powers has been waiting in the hangar there for three days, his earlier departure dates ostensibly scrubbed because of bad weather over Russia. U-2s have shuttled between Adana and Peshawar five times. Because of the mileage accumulated in those flights, the most reliable plane in Detachment 10’s inventory has been replaced with the least reliable. Worse still, according to the then U.S. ambassador to Kabul (briefed later by the Afghan foreign minister), the entire Pakistani Air Force officers’ mess in Peshawar knows about Powers’s mission in advance. In case it has not been adequately telegraphed to Soviet forces, the final go code is transmitted from Turkey to Pakistan over an open radio channel. Powers is indeed detected “in time.”

The makings of a conspiracy are strewn across the historical record. In practice, as ever, mismanagement is the more plausible explanation. Even if Burke “screwed the whole thing up,” as Beerli maintained when he learned about the myriad security lapses much later, he appeared genuinely distraught when news of the shoot-down broke.

Joe “Wonderful News” Alsop was less distraught. The same was
presumably true of his friends and sources in the missile-gap lobby, including Colonel Thomas Lanphier (retired) of the Convair division of General Dynamics. At the time of the shoot-down each superpower had approximately ten operational nuclear warheads. Two months earlier Lanphier had argued before Congress that if Convair had been allowed to start building Atlas missiles in 1957 it would have four hundred of them by now. One month before the shoot-down he made a specific plea for an order for one hundred Atlases and twenty Titans. After May 1, he never had to plead again. A contract with Convair was signed and by 1963 the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command had thirteen Atlas missile squadrons with one hundred thirty-seven ICBMs between them. Twenty-six years later, each superpower had roughly nine thousand warheads. Harold Macmillan called the U-2 affair “a very queer story.” For the defense industry, it was also a very happy one.

*  *  *

Fisher flew home with his wife, Elena, and daughter, Evelyn. They had enjoyed a few days’ shopping in the relative abundance of East Berlin and could now enjoy the company of their beloved, stoical Willie.

He was officially revered by the KGB but was too famous to be of any more use as a spy—or for his employers to admit he had never been much use in the first place. He gave speeches, lectured schoolchildren on the patriotic glories of intelligence work, and moped occasionally that he had not been able to give his life to art.

In 1967 Burt Silverman came looking for him in Moscow, to write a book and to apologize for failing to write to him in prison. A meeting was almost arranged through a series of intermediaries but was canceled at the last moment when a reporter got wind of it. So Silverman left him a letter, in which he made his apology and wrote: “I can only say that they were different times, and I was not above fear.… Maybe the reason I’m here now is to make up for that.

“It is almost ten years to the day since your trial started back in Brooklyn. Many things have happened to all of us since then—to me, my friends … and to you as well. I had hoped to talk to you about all of it. I had also fantasized a trip to the Hermitage to talk about art and painting once again. I also thought we could talk about your feelings about America and the people you met there. Apparently, this is not to
be. Some other time perhaps—when the two of us can meet simply as old friends.”

They never did. Fisher died of lung cancer in October 1971. His ashes were interred at the Donskoi cemetery under his real name, and a few Western correspondents were taken there to see for themselves the true identity of the master spy who never broke. They were even told that he was British.

His art outlived him. The Soviet embassy in Washington declined a request for one of his paintings from Robert Kennedy, but a book of reproductions of his Russian landscapes was published by the KGB in 1999, and two of his American canvases are still in the possession of the Federal Detention Center in Manhattan.

*  *  *

Fred Pryor did his best to forget what his friends called his Rip Van Winkle experience in Berlin, because it was easier to forget than forgive.

The family flew straight home, pausing only for a short press conference at Idlewild Airport in New York. Millard and Mary, who had spent an estimated $25,000 to free their son, were described as “beaming with happiness.” Fred was brisk and serious, in a pressed white shirt, jacket, and striped tie. “I would like to resume a normal life,” he said.

“Resume” was perhaps misleading given his extensive wanderings since college, but he was determined to knuckle down and join his brother among the gainfully employed. He found a teaching job at the University of Michigan and soon published his first book. It was called
The Communist Foreign Trade System
and referred briefly in the preface to his imprisonment: “The reader can judge the nature of my ‘spying’ for himself; for this book is essentially the ‘spy document’ which was found in my car upon my arrest.”

It was not a bestseller, but for many years it was definitive.

In 1992 Pryor applied for permission to read his Stasi file. In 1994 it was granted, and he returned to a reunified Berlin. In the reading room established by then for victims of the secret police in the former Stasi headquarters on Magdalenenstrasse, the sheer heft of his ten-thousand-page file gave him what felt momentarily like special status. Then someone appeared with fifteen thousand and he took his place among the mortals.

He was interested chiefly to know whether any of those he had interviewed had joined the Stasi in accusing him of spying. None had, though some had been denounced by their colleagues for their contact with him. That knowledge distressed him, but not as much as the circumstances in which he found the man he credited with his release.

Wolfgang Vogel was by then in jail, accused of blackmail by the reunified German state and by some of those whose freedom he had negotiated. When they had first met, Pryor wrote, “I was on one side of the bars, he on the other.… [Now] our positions were reversed. Although he seemed able to bear up under the situation, I had a hard time maintaining my composure. He had been able to help me get out of prison in a totalitarian state; but now, I could not help him get out of prison in a democratic state.”

Vogel served only a short term and retired comfortably to Schliersee, an hour south of Munich. His funeral there was attended by a fabulously retro cast of Berlin luminaries including Egon Krenz, the last East German Communist leader, and the last U.S. ambassador to East Berlin—Francis J. Meehan.

Having faced down the flood of memories brought on by reading his file, Pryor returned to the United States and lived with them for five more years. Then he took the next step. The file identified his interrogator by name. He went back to Berlin and looked the name up in the phone book. “I went to his house,” he recalls. “His wife stuck her head out of the window and asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to talk to her husband. I explained who I was, and she retreats and says to come back that evening.”

The two men went to a bar and drank beer for three quarters of an hour.

“We walked there and we walked back. I didn’t taunt him about the fall of Communism, didn’t ask him about his life,” Pryor says. “I wanted to know what they planned to do with me if I hadn’t been exchanged, what they were really going to try me for. He was not forthcoming. It was a meeting of two people who didn’t like each other. But he made no apologies. He still believes I’m guilty. He said, ‘You were spying. We did our duty.’ ”

Most of the original material for this book comes from face-to-face interviews that I conducted from 2007 to 2009 in Russia, Germany, and the United States with participants in the story and people who knew them. These interviewees included, in alphabetical order: Nikolai Batukhtin, Stan Beerli, Tony Bevacqua, James Bozart, Yuri Drozdov, Jack Goff, Jean Goff, Marvin Makinen, Carl McAfee, Frank Meehan, Joe Murphy, Alexander Orlov, Gary Powers Jr., Frederic Pryor, Burt Silverman, Annette von Broecker, and Mikhail Voronov. Eileen Cline, Carolyn Cooper, Richard Cooper, Sergei Khrushchev, and Martin Skala, among others, were interviewed by telephone. Igor Mentyukov was traced to his home in Belarus and interviewed for me by Olga Sorokina.

Among the most important primary and online sources were White House and other official papers relating to the U-2 affair made available by the CIA at the Center for the Study of Intelligence and by the Eisenhower Presidential Library. More declassified documents on the U-2 shoot-down, including a transcript of the Prettyman Enquiry conducted upon Powers’s release, are available at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Yet others have been released as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests by Chris Pocock. I used newspaper and magazine accounts in the archives of the
New York Times
, the
Times
(London), and
Time
magazine for contemporary views of Abel’s arrest and trial, the aftermath of the shoot-down, the failure of the Paris Summit, Powers’s trial, the building of the Berlin wall, and the Glienicke Bridge exchange. Recollections in the Russian media of the events of May 1, 1960, were also valuable, although most were not published until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The best research conducted since the cold war on Khrushchev’s desire for détente in 1960 is contained in
Khrushchev, the Man and His Era
by William Taubman, and
Khrushchev’s Cold War
by Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko.
Like Father, Like Son
by Vin Arthey and
The U2 Spyplane: Toward the Unknown
by Chris Pocock are definitive studies of William Fisher and the U-2 respectively. While any errors in this book are mine alone, I also turned for detail on Fisher to
Bombshell
by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel,
The Mitrokhin Archive
by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin,
Abel
by Louise Bernikow,
By Any Means Necessary
by William E. Burrows,
My Silent War
by Kim Philby,
The Shadow Network
by Edward Van Der Rhoer,
Sacred Secrets
by Jerrold and Leona Schechter, and
Special Tasks
by Anatoly Sudoplatov. For perspectives on the U-2 affair I drew on
The Man Who Touched the Sky
by Johnny Acton,
Mayday
by Michael Beschloss,
Reflections of a Cold Warrior
by Richard Bissell,
Remembering the Dragon Lady
by Linda Rios Bromley and Gerald E. McIlmoyle,
Red Moon Rising
by Matthew Brzezinsky,
The Craft of Intelligence
by Allen Dulles,
Waging Peace: The White House Years
by Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Spyplane
by Norman Polmar,
Spy Wife
by Barbara Powers, and
Skunk Works
by Ben Rich. For the context and mythology of the Glienicke Bridge exchange I made use of
Negotiator
by Philip Bigger,
K Blows Top
by Peter Carlson,
Strangers on a Bridge
by James B. Donovan,
Stasiland
by Anna Funder,
Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower
by Sergei Khrushchev,
Spy Trader
by Craig R. Whitney, and
Joe Alsop’s Cold War
by Edwin M. Yoder Jr.